The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good:

Went to hear Jay Ackroyd and CW Anderson on Virtually Speaking talking about the Wikileaks story; a lively debate and discussion.

I'm happy that the story is getting attention, despite the dog-and-pony shows of salmonella, Obama's birth certificate, the latest act-tress going to jail for being drunk and other ass-sordid magician's media trix designed to distract you from what the right hand is doing ("I said the left hand's diddlin' now... while the right hand goes to work")

'State of Mind', my installation about the politics and propaganda of information, will reopen as a benefit for Wikileaks on Sept. 12 ("What comes after 9/11?") on BORDC (Bill of Rights Defense Committee) land at the 4 Bridges sim.

Regarding propaganda, states of mind and journalism in general, why isn't this story being picked up by major media?

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More fantastic artwork is on display for the last monthly round of the UWA 3D Art & Design Challenge, including a very atmospheric and haunting piece by Nish Mip, nessuno Myoo's evocative 'As An Angel In Search Of Colors', Ub Yifu's 'Picasso - Don Quixote', Bignorrs Barbos' lovely War of the Worlds spidercraft, Eliza Weirwight's enchanting musical box, soror Nishi's pretty and friendly dragon and... and... and... go see for yourself!

SLurl: UWA 3D Art and Design Challenge

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Alizarin Goldflake threw a lovely Summer Garden Party Tuesday in a build designed to show sim builders how her artwork/installations can be used to create a magical environment. All the elements of the build worked together to bring a sense of peace and reflection to the viewer/inhabitants... and many there were! Old friends and admirers turned out to enjoy Ali's work and my own humble attempt at dancing geisha (photo courtesy of Corcosman Voom). Despite the transient interruption in the flow engendered by an ill-tempered child, the event was a marvelous melange of beauty, peace and friendship.

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The Bad:


Emeraldgate: *sigh* when Emerald was released, I listened to some well-respected coders, not slamming but questioning, some of the code in the browser; on the strength of that information and those recommendations I didn't use Emerald, despite all the wonderful things being said about it.

Well, this past weekend a volcano erupted surrounding the browser; you can read alllllll about it (several hours worth) and make up your own mind regarding the charges, accusations, obfuscations and cast of characters by clicking the link above (just follow the money links). Suffice it to say, until there is total transparency in the code, I won't be using it.

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Inworldz was hit Tuesday night/Wednesday morning by a botnet which took down the grid there. The contrast in the LL Boy's approach and IWs showed in the immediate appearance of Elenia Llewellyn on the Inworldz forums, giving us continual progress updates and Legion Hienrichs and Tranquillity Dexler working feverishly to restore the grid. This is the kind of support of the community that LL would be wise to pay attention to if they really wanted SL to succeed.

I'm happy to wait for services; being intimate with the web, the net and computer technology, I do understand that things happen. What I do not understand is a lame, lacking and arrogant response to such problems. The Inworldz Team shows how it can be done. Kudos and props to that crew for their continued hard work and most of all, for their contact with their userbase.


On another hand... hey botnet feebs: attacking Inworldz is like running over a kitten in a Cadillac; no skillz need apply. You want me to admire yer dastardly ch0pz? Hack mil.net or something really hard. Until then, yer small potatos. Any monkey or toddler can break a thing.

On the same note, users: Disable i-frames in your browser; CompSec 101. That would have saved you from Emeraldgate, among other things.

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The Ugly:

'nuff said.

Shameless Self-Promotion

In the famous words of somebody or other, "Art is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration and 250% shameless self-promotion." At least I think that's the saying. So in the interests of publishing, I will mention some things that's happenin' to me in a vain attempt to pretend I am a real blogger like soror Nishi -

[pretend real blogger mode]

1. I won the UWA 3D Art & Design Challenge Trophy Contest (tied for 1st Place with Sharni Azlee) which was sponsored by FreeWee Ling and the Artemesia folks. That was really nice :) There were a lot of good entries, some of which I wanted to steal because they were so good. But I refrained.

Corcosman Voom won in the regular awards for his 'Jump' which I was happy to see, as I have recently gotten more deeply into twisting regular prims... and I was happy to revisit with Nessuno Myoo's amazing 'Mechanical Knight', which I first saw long ago at Angelgate Gallery.

That stupid chair-hogging friend of Selavy Oh, Identity Absent, won something; perhaps possibly 'Noob-Dressed Pushy Chair-Hog', I forget. And Pixi Cosmos, who won the new Bohemian Ghost prize, also won the unofficial Miso "I'd Kill You For That Outfit" Award. At the afterparty I had a great time dancing with one of Nish Mip 's robot people.

As always, there were many amazing pieces on display, this being the penultimate (hooray for Jayjay for using 'penultimate' in the correct way!) round of the UWA 3D Art & Design Challenge. August is the last open round, and I will be sad to see the end of this incarnation; Jayjay Zifanwe, quadrapop Lane and the UWA folks have shown what can be done in the arts in Second Life with a little bit of attention and care. LL, please take note.

2. Also on the UWA in SL blog this month is a wonderful machinima by tutsy Navarathna for the MachinimaUWA II: Art of the Artists competition, so go see it! My 'Raindance' is happy to be included in this well-crafted tour of the UWA 3D Art & Design Challenge winners.

3. I was asked to participate in the West Coast Pop Art Lab's Artbreaker collaboration and showcase Sept. 4 celebrating their two-year anniversary in SL. I am really happy because the collab focuses on inter/reactive sound and art. Yay! Finally maybe I can be in a place where I don't have to put up "touch this art!" signs everywhere.

[/pretend real blogger mode]

Now, for some real reportage on the above stuffs, you should really go read the UWA blog, or soror's. Or like 50 other real blogs by people who have a clue. However, i think what I lack in real blogability i more than make up for in †yÞºgraÞ#¹©al †ºµµƒØØ£³®¥ ^_^

The Return of the Prim White Duke and Other Fables

Well, White Lebed asked me to take a look at her new blog and leave a comment... eh heh she should have known better :D It got so long... it's almost a post, so here it is:

RE: "vision"

After the moves of the last few weeks by LL, I am reminded of one of my favorite scenes in Waterworld, where the child Enola (Tina Majorino) turns to the Deacon (Dennis Hopper) while his ship is blowing apart and taunts calmly, "Was this your big vision?"

So Phillip has vision. All props to him for it; I well remember the crash of the VRML worlds in 1999, and If I would not have fled the larger net community in pursuit of 3D in the gaming worlds (the only ones to pick up the 3D torch at that time) I might have become Princess Linden, as I had a very early start in 3D development and construction...

I have visions; artists do that. So do madmen, housewifes, nuns, fakirs, mystics, geeks... having a vision is only the starting point. The sweat is in transforming that vision into something that can be shared with a wider audience. Usually, if a vision is big enough, it takes many more people to bring it into fruition. It also takes feedback and collaboration.

SL, to me, is still quite primitive compared to what I have seen in some of the more spectacular MMORPG like EVE Online and the Star Wars Universe. These latest moves by LL ominously remind me of the VRML debacle and the invasion of the vulture capitalists into the free net.

LL (or, more properly, their shareholders, who mostly don't give a rat's BUM 2.0 about whatever "product" they have sunk their little penny-claws into) doesn't seem to understand an ancient business principle: if you cut a baby in half, not many people will be willing to buy half a baby.

SL is still a baby, being eviscerated by these constant attempts to tail-gate and leech off other successful ventures like Facebook, Digg, et al.

[I am reminded of a hilarious line in Godzilla 2000, Toho Studio's beautiful and quite interesting reply to Sony Picture's "Godzilla" garbageheap. At one point, the UFO Orga monster is sucking Godzilla's Organizer G-1 DNA from him (which allows Godzilla to self-heal) and morphing into a copy of him. Yuji Shinoda (Takehiro Murata), the Dreamy Yet Hardworking Scientist turns to Mitsuo Katagiri (Hiroshi Abe), the Cold And Stupid Man Of Business and exclaims, "He's trying to become a clone of Godzilla!" An insightful slap at Sony for ruining/trivializing the Godzilla legend and a sly comment on the huge flop Sony had with their "let's try to make a Godzilla movie but without all the Godzilla stuff just the name!" debacle]

This is what I feel is happening/ruining SL for the last few years. The MBAs fresh out of Pinhead U. are scrabbling their "business models" in hopes of latching/leeching onto something, anything... when anyone in a technical field knows that fresh wet pieces of sheepskin are all nice and pretty and show that you are a good student who can regurgitate memorized answers but seldom mean anything more.

The moves by LL to fire, let go or whatever weasely and gutless metaphor they choose to use to describe the eviscerating of Second Life, the reduction of resources, the lack of response to issues widely-discussed and worried about by almost all CITIZENS of Second Life and the rest of the fiascos have me sadly deciding that Phillip's "return" is only as a figurehead/totem/fetish animal and means nothing to the world or to the citizens in it. It is just so much more MBA smoke, designed to let them keep their little trickle of income as long as possible until they flee a sinking ship; sinking by their own caving in the bulkheads, throwing supplies and provisions overboard, having key personnel walk the plank and raping the cabin boys (sorry boys :D)

I had a dream too, in 1996... of the metaverse. I have pursued that dream for many years, believing in the future of communication it would herald and the amazing possibilities in the medium. I have watched it grow only to be destroyed and set back 10 years by the predatory and illegal "extensions" Microsoft worked into their "free" browser in order to kill Netscape, VRML and much progress in these areas. I have watched the gamer's universe take up the flag and extend the world-concept to amazingly beautiful (full volumetric shadows, collision algorithmns, etc) places and yet be ignored by the "digiterati" in their discussions of the history of the medium and the contributions of that community.

I have watched countless companies go under (Geocities, Fortune City, Xoom, Virtual Places, Cybertown, The Palace, etc etc ad nauseum) in this same process of divorcing the creators and believers in a platform from the "business interests" who could care less if it's a VW or toilet paper, as long as they get their pinch of blood from "transactions." People who understand only the limited and distorted view of a shareholder's prospectus and don't know a damned thing about the "product."

You cannot buy and sell the future before it is born, and you cannot hustle a river. This shaving, deboning, crippling and gutting of the Second Life platform in search of saving pennies on some quarterly report is killing the entire goose that is making those pennies, which is Business Stupid 101.

This latest attempt to leech onto other successful platforms and spew flurries of buzzword-smoke is laughable to anyone with business sense who has also watched the web grow for the last 20 years. There is a prime rule in force in this medium: You Lag, You Lose. You cannot latch onto a successful and established platform years late; you should have either been there on the ground floor or caught on much sooner. How many Amazon or Ebay clones do you see maintain presence for more than a year? It don't happen. Do something else. Something original; something paradigm-shattering; something like Second Life was touted to be.

Trying to make SL into some buzz-2.0 mess is the most dangerous signal being propagated from LL these days :(

I'd like to have Phillip over for tea sometime. I am sure my passion for this medium at least equals his own, and perhaps he would listen to my earnest pleas and heartfelt suggestions on behalf of residents of his world and understand they come from no other perspective than love of his world.

Prolly won't happen... but you can dream.

BTW: Watching these ominous developments, I am hanging at Inworldz lately and through the generousity of Jeri Rahja and the encouragement of soror Nishi i have a place to build. Come see me!


ps- Qarl, i burned some sculpties for you :(


Once there were mountains on mountains
And once there were sunbirds to soar with
And once I could never be down
Got to keep searching and searching
Oh, what will I be believing and who will connect me with love?
Wonderful, wonderful, wonder when
Have you sought fortune, evasive and shy?
Drink to the men who protect you and I
Drink, drink, drain your glass, raise your glass high

David Bowie, Station to Station

BUN 2.0!!!!

Hey! I'm EXCITED!!! There's this GREAT NEW ART THINGIE by Linden Labs I need to MICROBLOG about!!!! plus i need to RSS it pronto, Tonto!

It's being BRANDED BUN 2.0 (i got the word through reputable sources) and it's so modern!!!! Bring on the dancing horses!

Yes! it is all AJAX-ENABLED, DATA-DRIVEN, CLOUD-SOURCED and as KEWL as FARMVILLE© without the COW POOPY*!!! It is iTASTIC© and ATOMIZED! It's DYNAMIC and STATIC with its' own API! It's a complete MASHUP of WIKIFIED SOCIAL NETWORKING and totally TRANSPARENT!!!!! It has INNOVATION for daze!!!!

Some of SECOND LIFE©'s best ARTVATARS© and CONTENT CURATORS will be MINDSHARING this total PARADIGM SHIFT and GRABBING EYEBALLS to SYNC UP with MAXIMUM BANDWIDTH!!!!

So get in on this eHAWT START-AROUND, fire up your SOCIAL SOFTWARE, CHECK IN, get VIRAL and TWEET IT UP on your HALFALOGUES FTW!!!!

And be sure to TAG my postie so peeps can DIGG it and I can snatch me sum SOCIAL CAPITAL!!!!! If you aren't SOA you're SOL**!!!

Legal Stuffs: This AFFILIATE PROGRAM is in no way eCOMMERCED! We swearz!!! Artvatars© 2010 by Pixie Brainz, LLC.


Meanwhile... Burning Man is still "Burning Man." Geez, how BRAND-LAGGED is that?!??!?! Buncha OLD peeps, f'sure, pwned n r00ted*** (rolls eyes) Llamas***


*"cow poopy" not on the Official List of 2.0 Buzzwords
** Ancient pre-1.0 word
*** old skool creds

UPDATE: erm, i has been inform-ed that it is "Burn 2.0" and not "Bun 2.0" so pls ignore my whole postie :D

UPDATE #2 - at a swank soire of soror's (+2 for alliteration) BUN 2.0 morphed into BUM 2.0, which i kinda like a lot. Just think... a giant burning 2.0 browser encased in large SCULPTY buttocks (in honor of Qarl), perhaps emerging from the crack...

if anyone wants to contribute a few sims for a BUM 2.0 parallel event, let me know; i'm sure there's HUNDREDS of artists and citizens who would participate ^_^

The Creativity Crisis - SL & elsewise + Facebook eats dirt

Newsweek is running an article entitled "The Creativity Crisis" which points out something that has worried me (and a great many computer/technical people) for quite awhile now. You can see it in the slew of remakes-of-remakes-of-classic films, girl-singers-who-you-can't-tell-apart, facebook-clones, web 2.0 gaga, flash-reinventions-of-old-concepts and gaming. Recycled (and lamer in execution) concepts with perhaps a small facelift or pancake makeup, offering nothing new or stimulating; only something recognizeable with a new "shiny" attached to it like a leech or a Botox injection.

I see the same problem in Second Life. Coming from a background helping to build the original VRs (Alphaworld, Cybertown, blacksun, Worlds, etc.) I am often saddened and disappointed in the so-called "progress" of SL and VRs in general. In 1997... we had "video on a prim," integrated email-from-within-world, stereo sound (my personal beef with SL's crippling of the FMOD sound engine), inworld and outworld-integrated IM... the list could go on. And all this useable from any browser... until MS polluted and subverted the W3C HTML standards and brought the VRML concept crashing down in their bid to take over and monetize the net.

Sure, in SL these things are better-integrated; sure, the interface is cleaned up... but what is new? 13 years of "progress" and we still have crashing browsers, borky asset servers, completely and stupidly non-functional "group chat," teleport problems, crapping-out sound... and what new paradigms? Just a refinement/prettying-up of the same concepts and functions I could use in 1997. I am not goggle-eyed nor romantic about SL's interface, having something to compare it with.


I see the same thing in SL among artworks. Of course artists are going to be influenced by things they see and applications of technique; scripting, texture tricks, spacial tricks; the uniqueness of the 3D worldspace. When you see something done with a tool you didn't know existed or something that causes you to re-examine or understand some aspect of 3D creation, it's natural that you will experiment with the technique, and that technique will have echoes to other's work (think flexi prims, texture fades/changes, inworld physics exploits, etc.)

But when you can look at a piece and instantly think, "Oh, that's Alizarin's work" or "Ah! I see Soror is working again" only to find another artist's signature on the work, that is clearly a lift, in the same way there were hundreds of Warhol imitators or fake Picassos. A school of art will have similar thematics, approaches and materials, yes; but an Apollinaire did not look like a copy of Picasso nor Juan Gris. Each artist used the techniques and philosophy of their particular school but managed to imprint their individual voices and styles in their works to the point where you could recognize a Picasso as a Picasso, and not a Gris, almost instantly.


It grates on my nerves (the few I have left anyways). When someone imitates a better-known artist, bringing nothing new to a composition - no individual voice, no interesting perspective, no vision - I dismiss the work, no matter how technically proficient the handling of that imitation is. Technique is mechanics, and mechanics can be learned, taught, imitated. What cannot be imitated is an artist's vision, and vision is what interests me in art.

So I am considering my "Fake Imitation" series, begun with a gentle joke for my friend Soror Nishi about the SL art scene with my work "nise ichiyou no Soror" (A Fake Imitation of Soror). Perhaps I will do "nise ichiyou no Ali" next, as I am seeing quite a few copies of Alizarin's thematic approach lately. But I will have to get a lot smarter before I can do "nise ichiyou no Glyph" :( Stay tuned.

[btw, i did try "nise ichiyou no Oberon" but i crashed the sim. Success?]

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PS - for the idiot "Web 2.0 buzzword monetize lets-try-to-get-in-on-something-that-already-is-old-because-it's-making-money Linden Lab MBA theorists," try directing them to this PC Magazine article entitled "Facebook, MySpace Get Failing Grade on Customer Satisfaction." Maybe this will influence the rush-towards-trashing-SL-in-favor-of-a-concept-we-didn't-get-in-on-early-enough-and-which-we-suck-at. Perhaps LL needs some people who have grown up on the net to tell them the elementary rule of the net: you lag, you lose.

So quit screwing the interface in a poor imitation of an already-existing suck-wind concept and get on with building the metaverse's future. Quit trying to sell half a baby to Facebook idiots who will drop the platform as soon as they get bored playing Farmville.

Summer Doldrums & Getting High On Music

Wired is running a great story about the Mustang school district in Oklahoma warning about the dangers of digital drugs - specifically binaural beat patterns in music.

Luckily, no one from that Oklahoma school district has visited my Temple of the Radiant Moon, where such beat patterns, along with alpha, theta and other Extremely Low Frequency [ELF] waves are incorporated into all the ToneSpheres. The Temple was designed to both relax you and to stimulate the pineal and corpus callosum using sound and color.

A lot of my own research for many years has been on the effects of sound and vibration on the human nervous system. The waves in the Temple took a lot of work, owing to the need for the wave cycles to be continuous and measured to loop at the right rates to produce the binaural beat effect without clicks or pops.

It is most effective to use such patternings with headphones on; the alpha and theta waves will reproduce through your speakers but you won't get the binaural effects unless you are wearing 'phones.

So please, if you are from Oklahoma and you are in Second Life, get a note from your Mommy, Nanny or designated School Thought Police monitor before coming to my Garden. Thank you ^_^

SLurl: The Temple of the Radiant Moon in the Garden of Sound

Other than that, it's summer; cicadas are singing and I am being lazy.

Iono Allen's State of Mind machinima

State of Mind machinima by Iono Allen

Iono Allen has made a beautiful and evocative machinima for my "State of Mind" installation. He has captured the rising tension and the feeling of suffocating in information which is an integral part of the installation. His use of the sound materials is masterfully supportive of the visuals; Iono has truly listened to State of Mind and realized it in this most perfect machinima. Please go to see it and let Iono know what a great job he's done and what a beautiful piece of work the machinima is in its' own right.


UPDATE: Iono's machinima made the swedish blogs! Yay!

And thanks to

Apollo Manga's Second Life Examiner review

Soror Nishi's blog




Further meditations on State of Mind

Yes, there is a lot of information in State of Mind. There are cross-connections between small, seemingly-isolated events, laws and trends. It takes a lot of time to understand these connections, these trends.

I am a researcher; a librarian; a datamouse. I understand the amount of time it takes to be current and to follow these issues. Too much for most people, who have a life to be involved in.
I keep up with these issues. When you try to talk to people about them, about what they mean to their lives; about what is really going on and how it does and will affect their free choice (like their choice and availability of music, movies, artworks and internet service) they think you paranoid.


That is why I needed to lay out State of Mind for my own mental health. I read perhaps 2-4 hrs. a day on the technical aspects of these issues, from technical forums; how the technology isn't secure; how it doesn't work as advertised, how it is misused by corporations to profile, how the idea of the "infallibility of computers" is used to disguise and cover an astonishingly large rate of failure/false positives...

We call it security theatre in the profession; in discussions among the people who actually install, set up and program these things. This is not "armchair philosophy" or politics. All of this... "think of the children" stuff is straight propaganda and deliberate manipulation and falsification of information.



Why It Matters

I live on the net. Anyone reading this is involved with the net and with information. These issues concern us all; our freedom to read and write our thoughts, and our freedom to think our own thoughts; our freedom to access information and make up our own minds, which is the foundation stone of democracy and freedom.

Orwell's Ministry of Truth or Brazil's bureaucratic, totalitarian government did not NEED to monitor every single person's thoughts; it was enough to influence them to monitor and censor their own thoughts. The point of propaganda is self-censorship and self-editing. It is a much simpler, easier and cost-effective way to control people than guns, bars, walls, barbed wire or Men In Black. You can rule great masses of people (take a look at China, South Korea and so on and etc) with much less trouble and effort, only needing your Influence Squads Corrective Thinking Trainers on the truly unprogrammable.


Yes, it is more comfortable to turn the mind away from these issues; it's much more comfortable to believe waterboarding is the equivalent of a "college hazing" than it is to actually view the uncensored photographs and material from Abu Ghraib. It's a lot easier to believe that these measures supposedly being introduced to keep you and your children safe are real efforts to protect you when in fact they are lies, mistruths and propaganda.




Thanks to the modern internet, we have access to a lot of information (although there is a debate current now that the positive glut of non-vetted and unverified information is a device to to hide by obscurity and overwhelming data; the Purloined Letter trick). It takes time and effort to research, as it always has, and to gather the information one needs to be able to have an understanding of these crucial and critical issues and make an informed judgement. It's just so... time-consuming! What's a mother to do?!?!


And yet... people will spend a great deal of time and effort puzzling out clues to the just-as-involved plotlines of television shows like "Lost," "Heroes" and their favorite soap opera than the actual, real things happening around them which affect their daily lives.



Such is the State of my Mind these days. I am not alone, and I am in distinguished company; that of Thomas Jefferson, Shulamith Firestone, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and many others who have given their time, effort and work so that I may enjoy the freedoms I have today (for now).



The links, the propaganda and the answering arguments and statistics are all in the installation. Laid out physically, with real links to verified documents, I am comforted in knowing that I am not paranoid. We were warned by Orwell and many others. The linkages and trends are real and happening now.

The STATE is now the Corporatocracy; the Plutocracy. Government is a brand; the flags are only advertising logos.

Since last March, the US vote can now be bought. The Disney machine continues to destroy and lock up our common cultural heritage by distorting and manipulating copyright for its own gluttony. Laws are being twisted to spy on schoolchildren in the name of protecting them; the drumbeat of fear is being used to encourage submission to the profiteers.

Our personal data is bought and sold without our knowledge and consent; banks entrusted with that information treat it with less security than you treat your car keys, and place the blame and expense on their customers, which results in cost to you for their lax and cavalier handling of your security... if they don't outright sell it to anyone for 35$USD (yes... google a bit; you'll find many such offers from these supposedly-legitimate banks).

Yet we let it go on. You trust people you shouldn't trust and give them your freedoms inch by inch. A little research would show you the truth, or at least enough information to make up your own mind about these issues.


I did State of Mind so I wouldn't start screaming.